Melis Ertem, CEO, MMALast year, the conversation across our industry was whether brands could trust influencers. This year, the conversation has changed. Trust is no longer a question we ask about creators. It is the layer that increasingly defines the brand experience itself.
In the Middle East, 78 per cent of consumers now discover new brands through social media, and 60 per cent report that they have purchased a product based on an influencer’s recommendation. The leadership question is no longer how to evaluate creators. It is how to organise around them.
From channel to infrastructure
For most of the past decade, influencer marketing was treated as a channel. A line item sitting alongside paid social, display and partnerships. That framing made sense when audiences were predictable and brand experience happened mostly through controlled assets.
Those conditions no longer hold. Discovery is fragmented, attention is harder to earn, and the most credible voice for any given audience is rarely the brand itself. In this environment, creators are no longer a channel for the brand to use. They are part of how the brand is experienced. That changes what we are buying, and what we should be measuring.
When the methodology catches up to the reality
Last month, MMA MENA released The MENA Influencer Marketing Guide, created by our Influencer Committee and powered by INFLOW & MONTENT. The guide establishes a shared, performance-based methodology for valuing creator partnerships, supported by a rate card, a budget calculator and a regional compliance map.
The most important thing the guide does is name what most leaders already know. Pricing in this industry has been driven by vanity metrics, particularly follower count, for too long. The shift from vanity metrics to performance-based valuation is significant precisely because it is not a tactical adjustment. It is a different way of thinking about what a creator partnership is.
What the regional data is telling us
Micro-influencers, those with audiences between 10,000 and 50,000 followers, now hold 45 per cent of GCC market share. The fastest-growing segment is nano-influencers, with audiences under 10,000. The “bigger is better” assumption that has shaped regional spending for years is empirically wrong.
Conversion rates for e-commerce campaigns in MENA typically sit between 1 per cent and 3 per cent. They rise to 6 per cent when creators use localised dialects such as Khaleeji or Najdi. Cultural fluency is not a soft factor. It is a measurable performance variable.
The brands performing best with creators are not the ones spending the most. They are the ones who have understood that the value sits in trust, relevance and cultural specificity, not in audience size.
Two archetypes, one strategy
The guide draws a useful distinction between the influencer, whose value lies in community and trust, and the content creator, whose value lies in the quality of the assets they produce. Both are essential. The strongest regional campaigns blend them, hiring creators to produce assets that look native to the platform, and influencers to distribute those assets through communities that trust them.
For marketing leaders, this distinction determines how teams are structured, how partnerships are scoped, and how value is measured. Buying reach from a celebrity is not the same as building distribution through a community of micro-creators. They are different disciplines, with different metrics and different risks.
Compliance as a competitive layer
The regulatory environment in the GCC has matured significantly. UAE Media Council licensing, Saudi Arabia’s Mawthooq framework, and tighter disclosure standards across the region are sometimes framed as constraints. They are more accurately a competitive layer. Brands that operate at standard, working with licensed creators and clear disclosure, will be advantaged over those that do not. The market is professionalising, and the professionalisation favours scale, repeatability and trust.
The leadership shift
The most useful question marketing leaders can ask about their creator strategy is not how many partnerships they have, or how much reach they generate. It is whether their organisation is set up to treat trust as infrastructure rather than as a campaign outcome.
That requires different ownership, different briefs, and different measurements. It also requires different partnerships, with creators chosen for relevance and authenticity rather than for the size of their audience. MENA is the market where consumer behaviour, regulatory clarity and creative ambition are converging fastest. The brands and leaders who build for the trust layer now will define what marketing looks like across the next decade.
Creators are no longer something brands do. They are part of how brands are now experienced. The work of leadership is making sure that experience is built deliberately.
By Melis Ertem, CEO, MMA.
